The Trans-Neptunian Object
by Quartertofive
Summary: Amy's drags Sheldon to her highschool reunion. It doesn't go terribly well.
1. Chapter 1

The closer they came, the more nervous Amy felt. She stopped the car two blocks away.

"Let's not go," she said.

"Excellent. You've come to your senses," Sheldon said. "Turn the car around."

"You're not going to tell me it will be fine?"

"Why? It's certain to be an odious and humiliating catastrophe."

Amy bit her lip. He was probably right, and yet...she had gotten dressed up, heels and makeup and everything, and driven an hour and a half. "It won't be."

"Oh, yes it will," Sheldon nodded, wide eyed. "Herd-like viciousness fuelled by mass intoxication is _de rigeur _for this type of event."

"How would you know? Did you go to your high-school reunion?"

He blinked. "I didn't go to _highschool_. And it was in Texas. "

Amy shook her head. "No, i'm going." At least it wasn't Texas. _Small mercies._ "We're going."

She was not the mousy girl she had been then. She had friends, she had a boyfriend (well, she had Sheldon) and she had, for crying out loud, a Ph.D. She had a saucy dress that bared her elbows and her knees.

Sheldon sighed theatrically. "Very well, if you insist on persuing this folly," he pulled a sheaf of paper from his bag, "here."

Amy took the neatly stapled sheets hesitantly. The first page was laid out like an academic article. "'John F. Kennedy Highschool, Class of 2003, Exploitable Weaknesses, by Dr. Sheldon Cooper'. Sheldon, what have you done?"

"Research." He glanced at his watch. "We have seventeen minutes to 8 pm, we should prepare some cutting remarks we can deliver to your erstwhile classmates."

"We don't really have to be there at eight," she muttered. She flipped through the pages. There were photographs of many of her classmates, and with them charts of income, debt, education, marriages, divorces, affairs, convictions, medical histories... "Maggie Carter joined the circus?"

"A carnival, just for a year, but that's nothing. Her second husband filed for divorce three weeks ago. When we find her - we have to stand to her right, she has mild hearing loss in her left ear from a concert she attended in 2006 - I could say 'why, that's a lovely wedding ring on that woman's hand,' and then you say, _'or is it_?'" Sheldon seemed to be trying to raise one eyebrow and smile at the same time. It wasn't going well.

"I am not saying that. And you're not either." She could hardly remember Maggie Carter, actually. Was she a redhead? "Where did you get this?"

"The footnotes will direct you to the relevant bibliographical entries on pages 39 through 44." Sheldon looked almost offended. "I always source my work."

"Nevermind! Don't tell me!" This had to be illegal. Did he have to sign it? She would have to make sure to shred the report, against the inevitable day when Sheldon would do something to make the police or Interpol search his apartment. Amy handed it back. "I'm not looking at it."

_Just at Sandy and Carly and Tiffany? _a little voice whispered. Just a glance? Had they gotten divorces? Or plastic surgery? Or flunked out of an art history program at a community college?

Amy shook her head and bit her lip. Sheldon was looking at her expectantly._ Just one look. _No. That was wrong of her. Penny had flunked out of community college and Penny was her friend. And Sandy and Carly and Tiffany, they had been...

"Put that away. Let's go." Amy stared straight ahead and hit the gas, maybe a little too sharply. The car lurched the rest of the way, taking the speedbumps hard enough to make them both bounce. Sheldon made a suppressed clicking noise with his tongue for each one, but he didn't say anything.

#

The gym looked like a gym with tinsel on it. The music sounded like 2003, but bitter. Amy thought about surrendering her woolen cardigan to the coat rack, but her fingers fumbled at the buttons. Elbows might be too much after all. She kept the cardigan.

"Oh boy," Sheldon sighed again, peering through the doors into the gym. It wasn't exactly crowded, but a handful of people milled between the stage and the tables over the markings of the basketball court. "Oh boy."

Amy took Sheldon by the elbow, ignored the way he twitched a little at her touch, squared her shoulders and marched in.

Nothing happened. No one turned, no one looked at her, no one pointed and laughed, no one set her hair on fire. _You've come a long way, baby. _Amy smiled tentatively and crossed the room to the refreshments.

She ladeled herself a glass of punch from a plastic fruitbowl. "Sheldon?"

"I can't drink something that has just been standing here, in the open." Sheldon peered into the punch, then up at the shadowed ceiling. "We don't know what lives in those rafters."

"Nothing lives in the rafters." _Probably_. She took a sip and felt its bitter-sweet alcholic tendrils wrap around her.

"Beverages shouldn't be ladeled," Sheldon said. "Ladels are for soup. Soup is a food."

Amy smiled. There was no use arguing. "Would you take the punch if it was to be consumed with a spoon?" she argued anyway.

Sheldon paused and tilted his head. "I'll have to think about that."

"Amy!" A half-familiar voice squealed behind her. "Is that you?"

Amy finished the punch, plastered a smile on her face and turned around. "My appearance has changed only marginally in the decade since we last met," she told Tiffany.

The other woman laughed and looked Amy up and down. "I'll say." Tiffany hadn't changed much either. Still tall, still pretty, still displaying a medically healthy bosomness.

"This is Sheldon. My boyfriend," Amy said. It was like a tiny warm sun in her chest. _I sounded natural saying that, right? Right? RIGHT?_

Tiffany laughed again. "I thought I knew all of your cousins."

Amy had a lot of cousins. Quite a few of them had died over the years in accidents that were horrific but statistically commonplace. (She had checked the probability once.) She ladeled more punch into her empty cup.

"Sheldon isn't my cousin," Amy said.

Tiffany smirked.

"Marriage between first cousins is legal in the State of California," Sheldon pointed out. "But it is a criminal offense in Texas."

Amy frowned. "Really?"

"Lucky for you, Amy." Tiffany winked.

"I already told you he's not my cousin," Amy said. Had Tiffany also developed hearing problems_? She's making fun of you, _Amy reminded herself. Right_._ She should have looked up how many times she'd been divorced after all.

Tiffany rolled her eyes. "Whatever. Seeya." She walked away to join a cluster across the room. Amy recognized Carly and Sandy...and they were all looking at her. She tried to ignore them.

"Are those your friends?" Sheldon asked.

"We hung out together," Amy explained. She finished her punch and poured some more. _What did I ever do before alcohol? _"I hated them. A lot."

"A nuance of social protocol i'm missing?"

"Just highschool. I did their homework and they..." Well, they had called themselved her friends, for a while, so long as it wasn't in public.

"I'm sure hating her was the proper response," Sheldon said. "She seems loathsome."

"She is," Amy said. "They all were, and I wanted so much to be like them. What does that make me?"

"Confusing?"

"Pathetic."

Sheldon considered it. "All right."

Amy sighed. They were still staring at her - and pointing and laughing. She felt the edge of tears welling up in her eyes. So much for not being that girl anymore_._

"Let's go home, this was a bad idea."

"No."

"What?"

"You can't drive, you've been drinking."

"Do you want to drive?"

"Be serious. Are we stranded?"

_Oh no._ _No no don't say it. "_We'll just sleep at my mothers, it's a two minute walk from here." Why had she said it?

She had no time to change her mind or suggest a better option, like sleeping under an overpass or hitchhiking to Pasadena. Sheldon was already halfway to the door. Amy took a deep breath and followed him, right past the cluster of Tiffany and Sandy and Carly.

"AAAAAAAmy!" Sandy called out. "I see the makeover didn't take!"

Amy winced. They had given her a makeover, one weekend. She had been thrilled. _So pathetically thrilled._ Makeup, contact lenses, a short skirt and low-cut blouse. For the time it took to walk from the door to her locker, Amy had felt beautiful. Then the laughter started.

She had never been their friend, only some kind of pet.

The song changed, sliding into the demanding beat of the White Stripes. _A seven nation army couldn't hold me back. _

She moved. Sheldon lunged to stop her, but he didn't have great reflexes. Her handbag took Sandy in the face. Someone grabbed her cardigan, but she had her hands in Carly's hair by then. Long nails scratched across her cheek. She lashed out with a foot. Dammit, it was hard to balance in heels. Amy went down under force of superior numbers, the bottom of a vicious pile of fake eyelashes and cloyingly sweet perfume.

_You are beautiful, in every single way, _Christina Aguilera crooned from 2003. _Words can't bring you down. _Well, she had been a lying blonde bitch then too.

#


	2. Chapter 2

A tree. Good heavens, she expected him to climb a tree.

First she had gotten him kicked out of a highschool like some sort of teenage rebel, and then led him through the seamy underbelly of almost a quarter mile of suburbs, and now this.

_The things I do for love_, Sheldon thought, and clambered up after Amy to the bedroom window of her childhood, trying not to scrape his palms or fall or get eaten. (The odds of the tree being carnivorous were remote, but higher than he was comfortable with.) Amy leaned precariously across the gap and wriggled in through the window. She tumbled out of sight with a "whoop!"

_Oh dear. _With a bit of contortion and an acute awareness of feet and feet of nothing but air between himself and the ground - _don't look down don't look down don't look down _- Sheldon followed. Amy pulled him by the collar and he was dragged into the house, everything gone topsy turvy. When his inner ear started doing it's job again - _thanks_, inner ear - he found himself sprawled in the dark. With Amy. On a bed.

"Why are you laughing?" Sheldon asked.

"A boy climbing through my window, who would have thought? Not since Josh Greene when I was thirteen, and he was trying to get out."

Their eyes met. She had that ominous speculative look, and even if she wasn't strictly touching him, she wasn't too far off. Amy did have tragically consistent tendencies when she was under the influence of alcohol.

Sheldon tried and failed not to think about that night on her couch. _Fascinating_. It was years ago and had only lasted an instant, yet here he was still remembering it. That's how bad it had been_. _Her lips had felt very warm, maybe because it had been a cold night? _Like tonight. _

"Now, Amy-"

She shoved him off the bed.

"Shut up and stay down" she hissed.

There was dusty carpet in his nose and he had a good view of the old shoeboxes stacked under Amy's bed. _No one tells Dr. Sheldon Cooper to shut up! _He started to get up, outraged retort on his lips, and then he heard the door open.

"Amy? Is that you? Have you been taking drugs?" It was her mother.

Sheldon stayed down and shut up.

"I have not been taking drugs, Mother," Amy said. There was a pause. The light came on.

"Sneaking in after dark, that whorish color on your lips and a run in your stocking? What am I to think?" Mrs. Fowler's voice was very quiet, on the edge of tears. "You are my only daughter."

Amy sighed. "I did have a glass of punch, Mother."

Mrs. Fowler gasped softly. "Amy, you are going to end up like your cousin Georgiana."

"I am not going to end up like Georgiana, Mother."

"That is what Georgiana thought."

"Georgiana was stung to death by wild bees on a hiking trip in Belize, Mother."

"Quite."

"I went to the school reunion, and I prefer to stay here and not drive back to Glendale tonight. That is all. There is night time construction work, and you know how I feel about fluorescent orange since cousin Albert."

"Dear cousin Albert," Mrs Fowler murmured. "Well, I suppose..."

_Well done Amy, _Sheldon thought. Then-

"You went to your highschool reunion!?" Mrs. Fowler's voice reached an unfortunate pitch on the last syllable. "Amy, how could you show your face? Without a husband, at your age?"

"I'm sorry, Mother." Amy's voice was tiny, and all wrong. "I would like to sleep now, Mother."

"Will you be sneaking out of the window again?"

"I"ve never snuck out of the window. I snuck in because I didn't have a key and I didn't want to wake you."

"That's enough of that."

"Good night, mother."

"Hrumph." Amy's mother slammed the door behind her.

Sheldon let out the sneeze that had been tickling his nose and started to stand. The bedside lamp Amy flung at the door just missed his head.

He ducked down again. "Amy!"

"She's just so...so..." Amy grabbed an encyclopedia and threw it after the lamp.

"Have you lost the capacity for speech and regeressed to communication via the flinging of objects?"

"Yes!" Amy picked up a teddy bear, then sighed. "No. I just don't like coming back here."

She looked at the bear, then around her at the room. It was very neat, (not quite neat enough, but close) and walled in books and posters of cornfields. Amy shrugged and threw the bear at the lightswitch, and the room fell back into darkness. Only the streetlights came through the window. Sheldon didn't normally approve of the dark, but this time it felt safer.

"I don't see what you have to be sorry for. You are only a few years past the median age of a first marriage for a woman in the United States, and accounting for ethnicity, education and income quintile, why you're just plain average!"

"Great. Good to know. Thanks, Sheldon." Amy buried her face in her hands.

Upset? Was she upset? How was he supposed to have any chance at a guess if he couldn't even see her face?

_Let's go with upset._ Where was a hot beverage when you needed one? Maybe he should start carrying around a thermos. The world was just full of dramatic misery recently._ What the devil has happened to my life?_

Was she crying? Before he could make up his mind, Amy straightened, righted her glasses, brushed her hair away from her face and put her hands on her knees.

"Well, I've made a fool of myself tonight. Please don't look at me, Sheldon."

_Splendid idea, _he thought, but his eyes wouldn't obey. She had been crying, and there was the beginning of a bruise on her face from the fight, and she did have a run in her stocking. He couldn't have stopped looking at her if it turned him to stone.

"I..." he started to say, then managed to catch the words. _Can't say that. _What was he, a hippie? Sheldon hated having nothing to say. "I think you're the bravest person I've ever met."

Amy crumpled again. Definitely upset. _Good call, Cooper_. He was out of options.

Sheldon sighed loudly so she would be sure to notice and sat down next to her, so close he could feel the warmth of her thigh against his. He _could _do this, he reminded himself. He took a deep breath and did his jagged best to put his arms around her.

"Oh," she said softly, and leaned against him.

It was awful.

This wasn't his Amy. She was all wit and smarts and a scathing arched eyebrow. This was an unpleasant mess of moist. His own body felt like a pile of rusty hammers, crudely held together at the joints with catgut and cheap sparkle glue. How could she possibly want this?

Then Amy let her forehead sink against his shoulder and for a strange fragile second, it wasn't awful at all.

_Well. _

_How 'bout that_?

It was as if a particularly tricky equation had balanced, and he was in one of those blank moments when all the secrets of the universe were almost visible in the corner of his eye, before the noise rushed back in. Her hair was soft against his cheek, her shoulder fit into the crook of his elbow like a minor miracle of applied geometry, and she smelled _great_.

He moved or she breathed or a cloud crossed the face of the moon, and it was awful again.

Sheldon disentangled himself from the quicksand morass of his girlfriend's body and lurched to his feet and most of the way across the room.

"Yeah, that's enough of that." He couldn't do this after all.

Amy shrugged, stretched, and sprawled on her bed, shoes and all. "Nice try, Sheldon." She yawned. "Good effort." She threw her arm over her face, and then she was asleep.

"Pfft. Alcohol." Sheldon watched her sleep for a few minutes, then sat at her desk. It was dominated by an ancient blocky monitor, surrounded by old school essays - all As, naturally - a pile of yellowing paperbacks, unsharpened pencils and dusty stacks of CDs.

Above the desk, in pride of place on a long shelf, was a row of girlish doo-dads: dolls in frilly pink dresses, dainty little statuettes of fairies and unicorns, Barbies, with their terrifying giant eyes and slutty shoes. They were meticulously arranged, but Sheldon could tell they had never been played with.

Amy made a cute little sound that might have been a snore or a sob, and rolled over. Sheldon found a blanket in the closet and threw it over her, then gingerly removed her glasses. She curled up like a hedgehog. A cuddly, drunken, giant hedgehog that smelled _great_.

_I could touch her hair again..._

The thought made his skin crawl. _Nope_. Maybe when his nerves calmed back down. There was an even chance that would happen by Thanksgiving, if he cut down on intake of carbonated drinks.

Well, what could he do?


	3. Chapter 3

#

A sharply slanted ray of sunlight woke Amy. The first thing she noticed was that her head was pounding. It had only been a few glasses of punch, damn it. Penny could drink eight times that much, adjusted for body mass, and still look like a crisp dewy rose in the morning. Amy felt like the blob.

The second thing she noticed was that the annoying ray of sunlight was coming through a window that no longer had any curtains.

"Sheldon, what did you do?" Amy sat up, feeling like her spine was a radioactive rod that had now been driven into her brain. The window, the wall next to it, the view of the street outside, all looked odd without the curtains. Those curtains had been there her entire life.

"You weren't using it. I can put it back. You don't need it." Sheldon's voice pierced like a hot needle through her brain, and not in the good hot-needle-through-the-brain way. For a moment there, last night, she had imagined he was going to kiss her. Then again, she imagined that all the time. By the harsh light of day, filtered through a hangover, it hat seemed unlikely.

Amy turned her head slowly. Sheldon was crouched defensively behind a stack of boxes, his hair dishevelled and a piece of packing tape stuck to his forehead. _What boxes? _She didn't have any boxes in her room.

She did now. Plenty of boxes. The rest of the space slammed into her conciousness, and she realized what she no longer had was a room.

"Sheldon, I don't understand." Amy found her glasses and put them on. It didn't make any more sense.

Her childhood bedroom was stripped down to four bare white walls and empty furniture. She could just make out the places where posters had been, but that was it. The closet was empty, the shelves bare, her desk a perfect expanse of nothing.

"This is clothes." Sheldon tapped one stack of boxes. "We'll drop them off at goodwill on the way. This is electronics to recycle, this is books to donate to the library, this is books to sell on ebay, this is books to burn because they have outdated science in them." Sheldon gestured to each neatly labeled box in turn.

"You sorted all this overnight?"

"It would have been _much _easier with a label maker. Remind me to buy you one for your birthday."

"Why, Sheldon? _Why _did you do this?" Amy tried not to sound angry. He probably wouldn't notice anyway. She just had to follow whatever train of logic he had ridden to dismantling her bedroom, which was the easy part, and solve it, which was the hard part. Then they could put it back.

Sheldon hesitated. That was rare. "You weren't using it. You haven't been here in three years."

"This is my childhood home, Sheldon. These things have sentimental and nostalgic value to me. I can't just throw them out."

"What things?" he asked.

_What things!? _"My stuff, Sheldon. Toys, books, memorabilia..."

What things?

All the books Amy had any intention of ever reading again were in her apartment, and so were any clothes she would wear. (_Never again_, she had sworn over the tie-dye.) But she had toys she was still fond of. She _must _have toys she was still fond of (she had seen all the Toy Stories,) she just couldn't think of any specific ones just then. And there were all those mixtapes and friendship bracelets and photobooth pictures and secret letters and...

Amy shook her head. There wasn't any of that. No one had ever made her a mixtape or a friendship bracelet. No one had sent her secret letters or crammed themselves into a photobooth with her to take goofy pictures.

It just really, really seemed like they should have.

She sighed. "Maybe the place needed a little sorting," she admitted.

"A little?" Sheldon threw up his hands in despair. "There was a Twix from 1997 in the back of your closet."

"I hid it so I would forget about it and then find it and it would be like getting a surprise present," Amy explained. "I'm still waiting to forget."

She looked around the empty room again, taking in the off-kilter, uncanny sensation of it all just being...gone. It was a little exhilarating, for some reason, and it probably wasn't even the remains of alcohol in her system talking. "But I still don't understand why you did this."

Sheldon wouldn't meet her eye. "I don't want you to think you need to come back here for anything. Not ever again."

The tiny sun in her chest lit up, hot and fierce and hard to talk past.

"It's an hour and a half through some of the most dangerous traffic in North America, and you'll make me come with you," Sheldon finished.

Amy couldn't help but smile, even though it made her head hurt worse. She stood up. "Let's get going before my mother wakes up."

"You're not going to say goodbye?"

_Brave_. He said she was brave. That wasn't a figment of her imagination. "I'll Skype her. Tommorow. Or next week."

She stepped around the boxes so she was looking up at him. He shied back a little. "Sheldon?"

"...yes?"

"Thank you."

"Was that sarcasm?"

"No." She reached up and pulled the tape off his forehead, and he let her. "We're not really going to burn my old books," she added.

Sheldon picked up a box. "We have to. All sorts of nonsense in them. A few say Pluto is still a planet."

"I thought you wanted Pluto to stay a planet."

"It was my favorite planet," he admitted, "Cold, dark, kind of crooked. But one has to keep up with the times, Amy Farrah Fowler. Things change."


End file.
